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RPG in a Box
- Buttons840 1y agoThis is built on Godot: https://godotengine.org/showcase/rpg-in-a-box/ https://godotengine.org/showcase/rpg-in-a-box/
- braggerxyz 1y agoBy looking at the screenshots I thought this looks a lot like Godot. So there is my answer ;)
- dandellion 1y agoIt looks like it's mostly self-contained and it doesn't seem to have a clear way to leverage Godot, which is a pity. It uses it's own script language, own resources, etc. It'd be really interesting to have something like this, and have full access to Godot, use shaders, custom nodes, plugins like LimboAI, Beehave, etc.
- lewispollard 1y agoIf it's a Godot "game" then it should be pretty easy to mod that kinda stuff in, there are plenty of tools to do so.
- garylkz 1y agoThey do provide ability for users to export the project as Godot 4 if needed.
- 90s_dev 1y agoSeeing stuff like this makes me so excited! Partly because I love game engines and making games, and partly because it becomes more evidence to me that programmers will really like my project when I finally release it! Hopefully next Monday!
- 90s_dev 1y agoIf the author is here: > It's similar to some other languages, like Lua, and is very easy to pick up if you have knowledge of basic programming concepts. Why not just use Lua or one of the forks like Luau?
- tosmatos 1y agoI'd thought they would keep GDScript since it's built on Godot, especially since you can export your projects to Godot afterwards. Not really that bad of a problem since GDScript's easy to pick up
- dang 1y agoRelated: RPG in a Box: A grid-based, voxel-style game engine built on Godot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37502218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37502218 - Sept 2023 (21 comments)
- deafpolygon 1y agoThey should take advantage of viral marketing: "I heard you like game engines, so here's a game engine in a game engine."
- torben-friis 1y agoSorry to be the one to tell you, but that meme is at this point older than many gamers themselves.
- pessimizer 1y ago2004(!)
- animanoir 1y ago[dead]
- qmr 1y agoI wonder how it compares to RPGMaker.
- freetime2 1y agoMy first thought on seeing the RPG in a Box homepage is that the graphics don't really do anything for me. Maybe it's just nostalgia having grown up playing Final Fantasy games for SNES, but when it comes to graphically simple games, I find that pixel art graphics resonate much more with me. So I would probably lean more toward RPG maker if I wanted to make an RPG. But then I had a look at the community showcase [1], and it's really impressive what people are doing. I've played a lot of Minecraft, and have experienced genuine awe and terror in those environments. And some of the community showcase screenshots definitely give me that same immersive feeling that I get in Minecraft, and which pixel art games don't really offer. I just had a look in the forums and it looks like you can do pixel art games in this engine, too. [2] So I guess my advice is to maybe highlight more of the community creations on the homepage as well as first-person worlds. Anyway, any tool that encourages and enables creativity is awesome. This is very cool! [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/rpginabox/comments/1hqx3h4/im_so_grateful_to_present_the_community_showcase/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rpginabox/comments/1hqx3h4/im_so_gr... [2] https://rpginabox.com/forum/d/547-the-twilight-isle/8 https://rpginabox.com/forum/d/547-the-twilight-isle/8
- johnnyanmac 1y ago>So I would probably lean more toward RPG maker if I wanted to make an RPG That may be a part of why they chose to take a 3d approach instead. RPG Maker has 20 years of iteration, so it's pretty hard to compete in that space. It's already a bit difficult as is to stand out in a 2D space to begin with. Meanwhile, 3D is still a hard problem and Voxels give that flexibility to make assets by hand that fit into an overall game.
- koonsolo 1y agoHey, developer of RPG Playground here, and I agree with you. My platform has moderate success (multiple games released each day), but to compete with RPG Maker means being 10x better. I was hoping to grab some of that market, but marketing wise it's incredibly difficult.
- jamalaramala 1y ago
- chrismorgan 1y agoFive megabytes for the acorn64 rotating box, because it’s a GIF. And a bad GIF that can’t play at its intended speed for most of its rotation, and so has speed jitters (without delving: I presume it’s due to format limitations, as it looks to be using more than 256 colours; see also https://www.biphelps.com/blog/The-Fastest-GIF-Does-Not-Exist https://www.biphelps.com/blog/The-Fastest-GIF-Does-Not-Exist). Ugh. `ffmpeg -i acorn64.gif acorn64.mp4` shrinks it to under 350kB, looking about the same except that it now plays smoothly. And will use a lot less power. (I noticed this because the page was loading unreasonably slowly for unclear reasons. In cases like this, a GIF <img> has a worse failure mode than <video>.)
- matt3210 1y agoUh is this a AI thing?
- the_real_cher 1y agoThis is not a rocket propelled grenade startup
- wsc981 1y agoThanks, the title had me confused.
- the_real_cher 1y agoSame, got a little excited at first
- Kiro 1y agoI honestly feel bad for anyone primarily associating RPG with weapons and not the beautiful world of role-playing games. You're missing out.
- __turbobrew__ 1y agoHave you ever shot an RPG? You’re missing out.
- the_real_cher 1y agodon't most RPGs have weapons?
- animuchan 1y agoAnd they don't put stuff in boxes either! What an enormous clickbait.
- jhbadger 1y agoI'm more surprised nobody's brought up RPG, the classic ptogramming language (which, like COBOL, isn't as dead as you might think) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG
- kayge 1y ago
- thomasfl 1y agoWe humans are story telling species. RPG in Box is what got my 12 year old son interested in programing. Not python. Not AI. My son wants to tell stories and let others experience his stories. Programing is just a means to an end.
- dazzawazza 1y agoWhen I give short talks at schools about game dev I try to make it super clear that we are all born game designers. We all make up games as children and a large part of that is story telling. Every child has seen a face in a cloud and 'designed' something outside of themselves. This is where teachers are amazing. Teachers know how to nurture that against the pressure of society crushing it. It was python+pygame that got one of my kids to learn to program and minecraft modding that got another to learn. Neither code now but that wasn't the point.
- lukan 1y ago"Every child has seen a face in a cloud and 'designed' something outside of themselves. This is where teachers are amazing." Hm. My teachers rather stopped me from looking outside the window to see faces in the clouds and placed me on a seat far away from any window so I could fully focus on the less interesting topics at hand, that society demands that I know. (Yet when I was succesfully done with all that schools, I found that I learned very little of practical value from my higher education anyway)
- 1y ago
- khazhoux 1y agoI’m very happy that there are modern equivalents to Adventure Construction Set! Seems like that idea was lost for decades.
- 2d8a875f-39a2-4 1y agoClicked expecting some sort of 3d printed rocket-propelled grenade launcher. TFA is not that.
- q2dg 1y agoNo open source, no fun
- aloisdg 1y agoYes especially when it is build on free and open source software. Of course they don't have to, but it is always better. As a user I wont dedicate myself to a software, the community can't fork. Like the enshitiffication risk is far to high.
- dmd 1y agoLinux is free and open source software. Should everything built on Linux be free? gcc is free and open source software. Should everything compiled with gcc be free? apache is free and open source software. Should every website be noncommercial?
- krapp 1y ago>Linux is free and open source software. Should everything built on Linux be free? Yes. >gcc is free and open source software. Should everything compiled with gcc be free? Yes. >apache is free and open source software. Should every website be noncommercial? Yes.
- dmd 1y agoWell, I suppose that's a philosophy!
- GuinansEyebrows 1y agoSay what you want about the tenets of Free Software, dude. At least it's an ethos. * this is a movie reference please don't come for me
- jamalaramala 1y agoLooks like a really nice and polished project! A note to the author -- if you ever considered going open source, you could use the same strategy used by Ton Roosendaal to open source Blender: In July 2002, Ton launched a campaign called "Free Blender" to raise money (100,000 EUR) directly from the community. To everyone's surprise and delight the campaign reached the goal in only seven short weeks. In October 2002, Blender was released under the GNU GPL. Roosendaal created the Blender Foundation to manage development, and the project kept growing from there. Today, Blender is one of the most popular 3D creation tools, used by professionals, hobbyists, and even studios. Being free and open source allowed Blender to power countless creative projects, including the 2025 Oscar-winning film Flow. This would've been much harder if the tool had stayed behind a paywall.
- noduerme 1y agoThis is a great comment. It's notable that this is a possible path to mutual success. But on the other hand, $100k seems like quite a small one-time payout for a huge amount (obviously years) of effort, unless someone has exhausted all other plans to continue trying to compete with established software by commercializing their project.
- jamalaramala 1y agoYes, $100K was a relatively small sum -- but the company that owned the rights was going bankrupt, and Blender was going to die. For a lucrative game, a reasonable value would be 2 to 4 years of earnings. For example: if the product makes $10K/month: $10k × 36 (a mid-range multiple) = $360,000 With this amount, the author would have at least 3 years of headway, with a much larger open source community.
- Suppafly 1y ago>In July 2002, Ton launched a campaign called "Free Blender" to raise money (100,000 EUR) directly from the community. To everyone's surprise and delight the campaign reached the goal in only seven short weeks. Seems like he should have set a higher goal.
- braggerxyz 1y agoThis looks a lot like Godot to me. So I would rather go with Godot instead. But nevertheless this looks like an awesome tool, less friction for creating story driven games is a good thing. Maybe I give it a try.
- gitroom 1y ago[flagged]
- pragmatic8 1y agoThis has been bothering me for a few days; I’m 99% sure that my parent is a bot. If you take a look his profile, _all_ of his comments share a remarkably similar structure.
- HelloMcFly 1y agoYes, I think you're right. Another observation: despite asking so many questions across their comments, this account also never responds to others who respond to them.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- footlose_3815 1y agoI'm having a very rewarding experience doing this mostly from scratch in Gamemaker using Claude. When I see apps like this, I get the fear that it has those RPG maker vibes where all the games will be same-y. That Roblox / minecraft kind of lack of uniqueness that makes for a great mod-game, but it always harkens back to the same patterns you use in the game engine that start to bother gamers like me. I'm working on a pixel RPG in gamemaker right now, using Claude as help, and I've developed a reasonably complex classic pixel RPG in less than a few weeks. I still had to constantly correct claude, but it was more often 10 steps forward and one step back. My whole engine and experience is mostly done, and now it's the fun part of designing the world. I almost have an entire sheet of custom sprites I plan on offering as well. I wouldn't trade my experience for some out of the box thing where I don't own a lot of the game's core content.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Rooster61 1y agoHugged to death, it looks like
- hungryhobbit 1y agoInventing your own programming language for your personal project is a TERRIBLE idea, and will likely doom the project in the long run. Languages require a huge amount of support, and you're going to be way too busy building an RPG maker to properly support a whole language. That means you're just going to wind up with a shitty unsupported custom language no one wants or knows how to use.
- alexjplant 1y agoWouldn't Lua be the classic/obvious choice for this application since it has such inertia [1]? I remember RPG Maker supporting Ruby back in the day but a lot has changed in the past 20 years... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lua_(programming_language)-scripted_video_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lua_(programming_lang...
- krapp 1y agoIn a better universe Godot went with Lua instead of GDScript.
- bbkane 1y agoThey actually started with Lua! They made GDScript due to https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/about/faq.html#what-were-the-motivations-behind-creating-gdscript https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/about/faq.html#what-w...
- simplify 1y agoTerrible idea how so? You just said it's a personal project. What's the harm in learning and doing what you want? :)
- tbrownaw 1y ago> Inventing your own programming language for your personal project is a TERRIBLE idea, and will likely doom the project in the long run. It's something that everyone should do at least once, ideally on a hobby project where it wouldn't be that hard to rip it back out if needed.
- seivan 1y ago[dead]
- korse 1y agoI was expecting a creative solution for shipping rocket propelled grenades. I am sorely disappointed.
- cosmicgadget 1y agoYou can use it to design a game where rocket propelled grenades fall in love, if that's any consolation.
- goodboyjojo 1y agoi bought this software on steam awhile ago. i had fun messing around with it
- southernplaces7 1y agoHere I was thinking they were going to talk about rocket propelled grenades in a box.